The following discussion of the background to the invention is intended to facilitate an understanding of the present invention only. It should be appreciated that the discussion is not an acknowledgement or admission that any of the material referred to was published, known or part of the common general knowledge of the person skilled in the art in any jurisdiction as at the priority date of the invention.
The concept of automatically calling phone numbers displayed on social networking websites and other webpage(s) by clicking on them is known colloquially as ‘click-to-call’. While there are many methods wherein users are able to accomplish ‘click-to-call’, most of these methods merely automate the process of calling without the need to manually dial the callee's number.
To elaborate an example of a typical ‘click to call’ functionality, when a mobile smartphone user surf the Internet and clicks on an icon (usually a phone icon) found on a webpage or social networking site, he is merely clicking on a link to activate a VOIP call to the specific callee's phone number. There is no further information relating to the context or purpose of the VOIP call which is transmitted to the callee.
The described concept above does not take into account contextual information pertaining to the call. The contextual information may be in the form of images, video clips, text comments, etc. Such context information may be important to the receiving party (hereinafter referred to as ‘callee’) as he/she may wish to know the purpose of the call before accepting the call.
Further, for current ‘click-to-call’ functionality, the connection between the caller and callee is typically achieved by a dedicated software application and/or dedicated communications channels, which often requires the user of the service to subscribe to an independent service from that already provided by the host network of the caller.
There exists a need and demand for contextual information to be provided to the callee, and in addition for current ‘click-to-call’ functionality to be implemented with existing network resources.
The present invention seeks to at least partially meet the above mentioned needs.